The connection with the 1995 Kobe earthquake in these six unabridged stories is curiously nebulous, but it keys with their uncomfortable sense of dislocation. Junpei, like Murakami, broke away from his parents long ago and doesn't call them after the quake; Yoshiya's mother insists he is a son of God, but on a train, he pursues a man he believes to be his father. Relationships are intense but ultimately unfulfilling, and obsessions, like Junko's with building beach fires, are all-absorbing but purposeless. The narrators succeed in conveying the striking, vibrant reality of these worlds and their aimless, intriguing weirdness.